Rescue teams work on the capsized hull of the USS Oklahoma in an attempt to save crew members trapped inside after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941. (U.S. Navy)
John G. Connolly, the chief pay clerk who died aboard the USS Oklahoma in the 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and became the namesake of a warship that served off Iwo Jima and Okinawa, will be buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on March 27.
Connolly, a chief warrant officer, was 48 years old at the time of his death, according to a Navy news release on Tuesday.
Connolly’s remains were buried as an unknown at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, along with almost 400 other crew members who could not be positively identified in the wake of the attack.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which is tasked with retrieving and identifying the nation’s war dead from World War II to the present, began exhuming the graves of Oklahoma unknowns in 2015 to try and identify them using advanced forensic techniques and DNA matching.
DPAA identified Connolly in December 2020, according to a database on its website.
Chief Warrant Officer John G. Connolly, shown here in an undated photo, will be buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on March 27, 2025. His remains were unidentifiable after he died aboard the USS Oklahoma in the 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. (U.S. Navy)
The Navy Casualty Office then worked to identify the appropriate primary next of kin to make funeral arrangements, a sometimes lengthy process that in recent years was hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.
John Gaynor Connolly was born April 28, 1893, in Savannah, Ga., according to the Navy news release. He enlisted in 1913 in Boston and by 1926 was a chief pay clerk.
His 28-year career aboard various ships took him to China, Russia and the Philippines, the service said.
The Oklahoma was moored on Battleship Row on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese torpedo bombers descended on military installations on Oahu.
Several made direct hits on the ship, capsizing it and killing 429 crew members.
The remains of 394 sailors and Marines who died that day — all too badly burned, disfigured or decayed to identify — were laid to rest in 46 plots for the unknown in 1950 in the Honolulu cemetery. All but 32 have since been identified.
Crewmen clean the 14-inch guns of the USS Oklahoma’s forward turret in this undated photo. (U.S. Navy)
Connolly was honored before the war’s end by becoming namesake to a destroyer escort.
The USS Connolly, formally designated DE-306, was launched Jan. 15, 1944, from the Mare Island Navy Yard in California and was sponsored by his widow, Mary Francis Connolly, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command.
It was commissioned in July 1944 and in January 1945 was dispatched to waters off Iwo Jima. It patrolled off the island to protect shipping and provide support for the amphibious landings.
The ship subsequently guarded convoys to Okinawa and conducted antisubmarine patrols there. It was decommissioned in late 1945 and sold as scrap a year later.
